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You are reporting the following post:Here's where gun contol is most needed

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Most of the illegal guns in Chicago are brought in from places like Indiana (right next door) where the laws are more lenient. That's why we need consistency. If you eliminate those disparities, you remove a big segment of the black market.

and prostitution is another way to make a living. You go after the root cause and the competition for business goes away. I don't think it's the gun traffic that anything more than a sideline business. Weapons are tools of the trade. Stop the trade and the tools aren't needed. I just don't know what it would take to interrupt the drug pipeline as it has quite a number of feeders.

Guns just help them get it. They don't need guns to get food, clothing and shelter...mostly drugs. If you could make the guns go away...which I doubt you can...they'd use knives, sticks, fists, whatever it took. Make the drugs go away and the guns wouldn't serve much purpose. Drugs are the disease and trying to take away the guns won't cure it.

are the drug users already?...and that if they had more money they'd turn away from drugs? Poverty, drugs addiction, violence are a self-sustaining cycle. Guns are but a tool used to get money and drugs. Other tools are available. If you could take all of the guns away from the criminals using them in this type of crime, you could maybe slow it but not stop it. So from whom should you take the guns? No doubt that economic issues are a catalyst in the cycle but being poor cannot be an excuse for becoming addicted and staying that way. We have some pockets of growing amorality that we're trying to manage but not correct. Our secular way of correction is through the prison system. Why not use it as a deterrent rather than just a potential temporary inconvenience for criminals? Put some teeth into laws and make them something other than opportunities for creative criminal lawyers to find loopholes and workarounds. If you commit a crime, you will have a mandatory sentence. If you commit violence, the time you're locked up will be longer. If you use a gun, you're done. It's plain and simple. Yes, I know our jails are already overcrowded but that's largely because we turn criminals over through a revolving door system. They are transient residents and too soon out on the streets. There's no incentive to worry about being arrested. At least that's what I understand about Chicago versus some other places like NYC.

In Chi-town, the major east-west expressway is know as the 'Heroin highway', with so many suburbanites (with $$) driving into the bad urban areas to purchase drugs. A very large percentage of the market is selling to upscale buyers.

It's not like "poverty" is a substance you can wash off, or extract, or amputate. Poverty is a lack. Too often it's not as much a lack of money as a lack of effort. There is a market for the drugs and like all markets, eventually a supply shows up if the price is right. Police action raises the price to make it right, and the forces of supply and demand surge. The more you penalize something, the greater it's value becomes.

OK, since you apparently already know that the shooter was in possession of the gun legally, and how this came to be, please tell the rest of us specifically what kind of law would have prevented him from getting the gun in the first place.

inner city streets where the violence is happening daily against innocent people. It means you round up these criminals and put them and their guns in a lockup and not just go after the easy prey of those who have purchased guns legally, are registered, and their whereabouts known. That's what it means. I think you might do well to ask for clarification if you're not sure of what's being said rather than jumping down someone's throat. BTW, a personal attack wasn't made. That charge is also false. I was simply using a phrase you used related to jumping up and down with unverified information. It was meant, slightly, to be humorous and not uncomplimentary. Get it now?

Allow drugs to be so cheap for them there is no need for users without adequate income to turn to crime to supply their addiction? The price drops so much that it becomes unprofitable for street gangs to compete with their substandard supplies?

Less jail space taken up. Less police time concentrated on drug users, available for other areas involving crimes against others rather than personal sins affecting one's own body. Loss of any reason for gangs to fight over sale of drugs since they could no longer compete against a cheap supply, not enough money in it anymore. The War on Drugs has become the longest running Prohibition Act in this country's history and resulted in the same predictable crime wave.